


Fall

by asgardianpirate



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M, canon-compliant so character death should not be a surprise, not-so-graphic description of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 02:12:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3191450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asgardianpirate/pseuds/asgardianpirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a long fall from the train.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Plotless vomit of feelings and pain.

 

It was a long fall from the train. 

 

They say before you die your life flashes before your eyes. But all Bucky remembered was the wind, the wind that blew with a monstrous force high up on that mountain. It was so cold that Bucky could not scream, and any sound died in his throat, frozen. Bucky blinked and the train was already gone from Bucky's vision, as were Steve's screams and Bucky's name. All around him the world settled into a lifeless quietness save for the whistling of the snow. 

 

At last he hit the ground, into the layers of snow and ice, centuries undisturbed. He lay there and let the falling snow count his broken bones. He lay there and bled in silence. Trapped in a shattered, useless body, Bucky Barnes watched the snow flakes twirl and fall and fall. He thought of the same snow flakes that used to twirl and fall under the light of lamp posts lining the streets of Brooklyn, but in a warm and yellow light. He listened to the nothingness around him and thought of the dim bustling of their old neighbourhood, the bells of bicycles and honks of cars, the high-pitched greetings of women and the dull chattering that constantly occupied the background. They were ever the city boys, he and Steve. They knew the streets of Brooklyn like the lines on their palms, and scraped their knees and spilled tears and blood in one too many back alleys. The noise of the city had breathed and bled itself into their veins, and they had carried that constant thrum of life into the war, into the mountains and the deep folds of Italian forests.The world may never know that Captain America and the sharpest shooter of the 107th found the absence of city noises unnerving, but at night they lay in their bedrolls and stared into the impossible darkness of the mountains; closed their eyes and went back to the bustling neighbourhood lit in yellow light. 

 

Then came the Russians who collected him like another piece of scrap metal, hauling him away and leaving a trail of red behind. Bucky felt distant from his own body as it dragged lifelessly through the snow, the pain in his limbs jagged but numbed by the cold. 

 

James Buchanan Barnes had died in that snow and cold. It was no dramatic death of a hero that he and Steve used to see in the pictures, something that happened in an instant as if someone simply flicked off the lights. Bucky Barnes died slowly, had the life drained out of him as the world stood by and watched in innocent apathy.

 

They took his body and made him into something else then, in a lab cold with the shine of metal. They hacked away his frostbitten flesh and attached their experiment onto him, woke him up, put him out and woke him up again. They poked and tinkered and strapped him down so they could poke and tinker some more, and James Barnes was switched on and off and on again, bleeding his life away on a slab of metal table. 

 

What’s left of James Buchanan Barnes closed his eyes, and went back to that Brooklyn street lit by yellow light.


End file.
